Speakers

Evan Adams graduated with a Computer Science degree from Oregon State University and has worked at Google for the past 13 years. He worked on Google Slides, ensuring consistent line-breaking in the face of different browsers, OSs, font files, font-rendering engines, zoom levels, kerning, etc., for which a US patent was granted. Adams is currently part of the Google Fonts team. Google Fonts is “making the web more beautiful, fast, and open through great typography.” Delivering the desired fonts in a timely fashion is essential, and Adams has been focused on discovering the best strategies for delivering Korean fonts.

Shani Avni is an independent designer and researcher. Fascinated with letters and the stories they tell, she collaborates with designers and educators in order to expose more practitioners to this subject through workshops and lectures. For her Typeface Design MA thesis from the University of Reading, UK, Avni researched the David Hebrew typeface family, and continues to do so. She was chosen for the 2017 Cary Collection Research Fellowship at RIT, USA, where David’s work is archived. Avni continues her efforts to make historical information available as both an academic and a practical source of reference.

Vinod Balakrishnan is a Lead Sr. Computer Scientist working for Adobe’s Photoshop Engineering team based in San Jose, California. He has been with the Photoshop team for the past 16 years, bringing typographic features to the product. Lately, Balakrishnan has been working on bringing variable fonts, OpenType SVG fonts, a Glyphs Panel, and script support to Adobe products.

Erin Beckloff is a letterpress printer, designer, educator, and filmmaker who preserves anecdotal and technical knowledge of printing history and culture. She serves as an assistant professor of Communication Design at Miami University and holds an MFA in Graphic Design from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Beckloff has been a featured speaker at two Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum Wayzgoose conferences; organized a panel for the UCDA Educator’s Summit; been selected for two College Book Art Association Conferences including a panel with Katherine Fries; and given lectures with Pressing On: The Letterpress Film at seven American universities.

Sofie Beier is a type designer and associate professor employed at the School of Design under the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where she is head of the Centre for Visibility Design. She holds a Ph.D. from the Royal College of Art in London. Beier has published numerous academic papers on legibility and typeface perception and is the author of the books Reading Letters: Designing for Legibility and Type Tricks: Your Personal Guide to Type Design. Her current research is focused on improving typeface legibility for both normally sighted and low-vision readers.

Clare Bell is a designer, researcher, and lecturer at DIT. A graduate of Central Saint Martins, she worked for a number of years as an editorial designer at The Guardian. Prior to this, she was a senior designer at Radio Teilifís Éireann. Bell is founder member/co-coordinator of the Typography Ireland seminar group and a board member of ATypI. She was co-organizer of ATypI annual's conference, “The Word” (2010; hosted by DIT in Dublin), and co-founder/organizer/programmer of Face Forward International Typography Conference (2015; DIT, Dublin) and co-editor of its forthcoming journal. Bell is an assessor on the Assessment Scheme of the ISTD.

Johannes Bergerhausen studied Communication Design at Hochschule Düsseldorf. He lived and worked in Paris from 1993–2000, where he collaborated with Gérard Paris-Clavel and Pierre Bernard. In 1998, Bergerhausen was awarded a grant from the French CNAP. He returned to Germany in 2000 and, since 2002, has been a Professor of Typography at Hochschule Mainz. In 2005, Bergerhausen started decodeunicode.org. He published Decodeunicode—The World’s Writing Systems in 2011 and Digital Cuneiform in 2014. From 2014–2016, he was visiting professor at Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT) in Nancy, France.

David Berlow entered the type industry in 1978 as a letter designer for Mergenthaler, Linotype, Stempel, and Haas foundries. He joined the newly formed digital type supplier, Bitstream, Inc., in 1982. After Berlow left Bitstream in 1989, he founded The Font Bureau, Inc., with Roger Black. In 1994, he founded Interactive Bureau with Black and others. In 2008, Berlow founded Webtype with Petr van Blokland and others, and in 2016, with Font Bureau and other foundries, created Type Network.

Bianca Berning is a font engineer and type designer and heads up the Skills and Process department for font foundry Dalton Maag. She is an active member of Alphabettes, ATypI, and the Unicode Consortium, and she coordinates a mentorship program with the aim of helping students and professional newcomers immerse themselves in the type industry.

Marta Bernstein studied Graphic design at Politecnico di Milano before moving to the Netherlands to complete a Master’s in type design at the KABK in The Hague. Besides her graphic design practice in Milan, Bernstein is one of the founders of CAST, the first digital independent Italian type foundry. She has been involved in teaching typography and type design on a regular basis since 2007 in various international universities and design schools. Bernstein is adjunct professor in Typography at Politecnico University and visiting professor at the Architecture and Design faculties of Navarra University in Pamplona, Spain.

Frank E. Blokland is type designer, Senior Lecturer at the KABK since 1987, and Research Fellow at the Plantin Institute of Typography since 1995. Blokland founded the Dutch Type Library in 1990 and supervised the development of FontMaster and FoundryMaster, professional font tools produced together with URW. In October 2016, Blokland successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation at Leiden University, the outcome of research conducted in order to test the hypothesis that Gutenberg and his peers developed a standardized system for the production of textura type, and that this system was used for the creation of roman type in the Renaissance.

Annie Bocel graduated from the Estienne school of engraving,made her apprenticeship with engraver Jean-Luc Seigneur, then taught intaglio in a Parisian workshop and learned the impression of embossing within the company Creanog. Rich from these successive experiences, Bocel opened a printmaking workshop in northern Finistère and simultaneously became an engraver of typographic punches at the Imprimerie Nationale printing office.Bocel’s prints are about nature, time, and imprint. Sensitive to the idea of ​​what is lost and what disappears, she likes to see things revealed and hear their stories. She velieves writing and geometry are essential in this quest for forgotten forms.Echoing this personal work and following a three-year transmission in the framework of the Maitre d’art program set up by INMA (National Institute of Art Craft), Bocel contributes to the valorization and conservation of engraving typographic punches, a profession recently listed on the inventory of French intangible cultural heritage.

Mary Ann Bolger is a lecturer in Design History and Visual Culture at the Dublin School of Creative Arts, Dublin Institute of Technology, where she is program chair of the BA in Visual and Critical Studies. Bolger received her doctorate and her MA in the History of Design from the Royal College of Art, London. She is ATypI country delegate for Ireland. With Clare Bell, Bolger runs the research group Typography Ireland and its practice-based seminar group TypeClub. Together, they organized the 2015 Face Forward International Typography Conference and the 2010 ATypI conference in Dublin.

Veronika Burian studied Industrial Design in Munich and worked in that field in Vienna and Milan. Discovering her true passion for type, she graduated in 2003 with distinction from the MA in Typeface Design course in Reading, UK. Burian then worked as a type designer at DaltonMaag in London, spent time in Boulder, Colorado, and her hometown, Prague, and now enjoys life in sunny Cataluña, Spain. Burian is a type designer and the co-founder of the independent type foundry TypeTogether with José Scaglione, publishing award-winning typefaces and collaborating on tailored type projects. She is also involved with Alphabettes.org, and gives lectures and workshops at international conferences and universities.

Lara Captan is an independent type designer and typographer born in Beirut and based in Amsterdam. She spent over a decade analyzing and experimenting with the structures, aesthetics, and historical transformations of the Arabic script. Since March 2015, Captan has been designing Arabic typefaces for DecoType’s ACE layout engine as well as OpenType. She regularly speaks at type conferences and design events around the world. In March 2016, Captan co-founded the “Arabic Type Design—Beirut” educational program along with Kristyan Sarkis.

Matthew Carter is a type designer with 60 years’ experience in typographic technologies, ranging from hand-cut punches to computer fonts. After a long association with the Linotype companies, he cofounded Bitstream Inc. in 1981, a digital type foundry where he worked for ten years. Carter is now a principal of Carter & Cone Type Inc., designers and producers of original typefaces, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Carter’s type designs include ITC Galliard, Snell Roundhand and Shelley scripts, Helvetica Compressed, Olympian, Bell Centennial, ITC Charter, Mantinia, Sophia, Big Caslon, Big Moore, Miller, Roster, Georgia, Verdana, Tahoma, Sitka, and Carter Sans. Carter has attended 34 ATypIs, beginning in 1963.

Elí Castellanos (1980) studied Graphic Design in Oaxaca, Mexico, and did a Master’s in Typography and Graphic Design in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. His work has been selected for the Latin American Biennial Tipos Latinos 2006, 2010, and 2014. Castellanos was given a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design in 2011 by the Communication Arts Typography Competition. He won the Gold prize at the Morisawa Type Design Competition in 2014. Castellanos now works as a Font Developer at the Dalton Maag studio in London.

Antonio Cavedoni is a type designer and researcher from Sassuolo, Italy. He graduated with an MA in Typeface Design from the University of Reading and then spent seven years in the United States, working on fonts at Apple in California. Cavedoni is now back in Italy, based in Milano, where he works on type design and lettering, and researches the history of letterforms.

Vincent Chan is a graphic designer who specializes in type design and a current Ph.D. candidate at Monash University. His research is concerned with forms of design practice that embrace a speculative position toward the discipline’s very raison d’être and the conditions and nature of practice. Chan teaches at Monash University and RMIT University and proposes typefaces and pedagogical projects under the moniker Matter of Sorts.

Sabina Chipară was born in 1987 near the seaside in Constanța, Romania. She moved to Bucharest to study graphic design at the National University of Arts. Curious about letter shapes, Chipară started on a journey of discovery that took her around the world—to Barcelona for the Advanced Typography Master at EINA University; to London as a Monotype intern; and to Amsterdam as a freelancer type and graphic designer. During her training in London, Chipară designed Rosella, a contemporary decorative type family which was subsequently released by Monotype in October 2017. Together with with Diana Ovezea at Acute Studio Amsterdam, Chipară designed Bega and Britney.

Alessandro Colizzi is professor at UQAM’s École de design in Montréal. He teaches graphic design history, typography, and type design. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Leiden, an MA in Type Design from The Hague’s Royal Academy of Arts, a postgraduate diploma from Atelier National de Recherche Typographique, and an M.Litt in English Literature from the University of Rome La Sapienza. Colizzi’s research interests are focused on design history, typography, and information design. He has published regularly in design periodicals and academic journals, and translated design-related works. Colizzi is a member of ATypI, ISTD, Design Research Society, A/I/S/ Design, and AIAP.

Emanuela Conidi is an independent typeface designer and researcher based in London, with specialized expertise in Arabic script culture. Before relocating to the UK, Conidi acquired a Master’s degree in Design and Visual Communication from the Polytechnic University in Milan, where she also cofounded a graphic design studio. Conidi has worked full-time as a typeface designer at Fontsmith, collaborating in developing Latin and non-Latin projects for the foundry’s library and for a variety of clients. Conidi holds an MA in Typeface Design and recently earned her Ph.D. from the University of Reading.

Antonia M. Cornelius lives and works as a typeface and communication designer in Hamburg. She studied with Jovica Veljović and Albert-Jan Pool, with a focus on typeface design, and produced an award-winning research-based typeface design graduation project. Currently, Cornelius is completing her Ph.D. at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design, Kiel, on the importance of serifs for the legibility of text typefaces. In her book, Letters in your head: What creatives should know about reading processes to design reading delight, (Hermann Schmidt, 2017), Cornelius bundles her collected knowledge about perception, reading processes, typeface design, and typography.

Joana Correia graduated from the MA Typeface Design program at Reading in 2011. Since then, she has worked as a freelance type designer in collaboration with other type designers. In 2018, Correia founded her own type foundry, Nova Type. She has taught type design at ESAD, and at Matosinhos from 2011–2017. Correia has given lectures and workshops around Europe, such as at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw as a visiting teacher, and at FEED, organized by the Associación Galega de Diseño. Correia’s most recent work includes the typefaces Artigo, Laca, and Artigo Display, available at Nova Type.

Edna Cunha Lima has a degree in Visual Communication from the Federal University of Pernambuco (1979), a Master's degree in Design from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (1998), and a Ph.D. in Communication from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2003). Lima is currently an adjunct professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and evaluator of the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research. She participated in the project PROCAD Memória Grafica Brasileira (Brazilian Graphic Memory), which brought together professors from PUC-Rio, SENAC-SP, and UFPE for research purposes. Lima participates in the following research groups: Design, History, Critics, and Society at the University of São Paulo (USP) and its Press, and circulation of ideas: the role of newspapers in the XIX and XX centuries of the Casa Ruy Barboza, Rio de Janeiro, both certified by the Brazilian national agency of research, the CNPq.

Sara De Bondt is a graphic designer and co-director of Occasional Papers, a nonprofit publisher of affordable books on the history of graphic design, art, architecture, film, and literature. Making knowledge available and affordable has become one of her central issues since starting Sara De Bondt studio in 2003. Based in London and Ghent, the studio’s approach is research and idea driven, with strong emphasis on visual clarity and typographic detailing. This has led to a wide range of projects from international clients such as Taipei Biennial, WIELS, Tate, Institute of Contemporary Arts, V&A Museum, Artissima, Camden Arts Centre, Haus der Kunst, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, and many more. De Bondt is a teacher and researcher at KASK/School of Arts in Ghent, and previously taught at Central Saint Martins (London) and the Royal College of Art (London). She has given talks and workshops at conferences such as Integrated (Antwerp), Spark (Auckland), Otis (Los Angeles), and Kolla (Stockholm). In 2008, De Bondt founded Occasional Papers together with Antony Hudek, and, since then, has co-edited three books: The Master Builder: Talking with Ken Briggs and The Form of the Book Book (both with Fraser Muggeridge) and Graphic Design: History in the Writing (1983–2011) (with Catherine de Smet).

Rafael Dietzsch is a type designer, typographer, and educator based in Brasília, Brazil. He completed the MA in Typeface Design from University of Reading, UK. Dietzsch is currently the assistant professor at the Faculty of Communication, University of Brasília, Brazil, and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Brasília. For the past ten years, Dietzsch has been designing identities, publications, and album covers. Today, he is a partner at Estereográfica, a small publishing house specializing in type and typography.

Craig Eliason is a professor of modern art and design history at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. Type design history has been his scholarly focus for two decades. He has presented and published research on the history of type classification, including articles in Design Issues and Printing History. Eliason is also a type designer: his “ambicase” types were profiled in Codex and exhibited at the Gutenberg Museum, and his forthcoming Backflip (then named Flipper) earned honorable mention at the Morisawa Type Design Competition. Eliason founded and coordinated Type Tuesdays, a Twin Cities typography affinity group.

Bahman Eslami started his career in 2003 by working in different advertising agencies. After receiving an MA in Type & Media from the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK), Eslami established his studio, Bahman Design, in The Hague. These days, he’s mostly involved in designing custom Arabic typefaces. Eslami has designed the Arabic companion for some of the most well-known Latin typefaces, including Fedra, Kohinoor, Diodrum, and the award-winning Harir typeface, which was chosen as one of the best typefaces of the last decade by the Letter.2 competition.

Ramiro Espinoza studied graphic design at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Santa Fe, Argentina. After graduation, he taught Typography at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Espinoza specialized in type design at the KABK in The Hague and the Plantin Institute of Typography in Antwerp. He has been a contributor to several design magazines, researched vernacular Dutch lettering, and worked in numerous freelance assignments for FontShop International, Shinn Type, and Feliciano Type Foundry. In 2007, Espinoza founded Retype Foundry to market his typefaces. He is the author of The curly letter of Amsterdam.

Lasse Fister is the lead developer of Metapolator, ufoJS, and Atem. At the moment, he’s freelancing as a font engineer for various projects with Google; before that, he worked on full-stack web development. Fister is into type, creative thinking, and programming, and has a keen interest in using and making free/libre open source software.

Katherine Fries, a studio artist and educator specializing in printmaking, letterpress, foundations, and painting, explores storytelling and preservation through the understanding and use of objects as biography. Fries, Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of Indianapolis, holds an MFA from Miami University. Fries actively shares her scholarly pursuits in a variety of ways, including but not limited to presenting at the College Book Arts Association, Foundations in Art: Theory and Education Conferences, as well as being invited to speak at events such as Preservation Through Production, Seduction, and Education, Hatch Show Print, Nashville, Tenn., and Indiana Humanities’ event: TILT.

Nelly Gable, type punchcutter at the Imprimerie Nationale, was appointed Maître d’art (living treasure of art) by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in 2013. A graduate of the École Boulle in Paris, Nelly Gable had to impose herself in a male-dominated profession. She first worked in jewelry as a relief engraver serving Murat (for Guy Laroche and others). Then, in 1987, she entered the Cabinet des poinçons of the Imprimerie Nationale to practice an endangered trade, that of type punchcutter.Gable specializes in the graphic arts: “When we have experimented with other types of engraving, we realize that here we need extreme rigor. A letter is not like a jewel, it is part of a set. If the type weight is too bold or too light, the harmony of the page is no longer respected. We must facilitate reading.”Gable, the first female punchcutter, works at the restoration of the collections and is in charge of watching over the engraved heritage of the Cabinet des poinçons, which includes about 700,000 pieces classified as Monuments historiques. In 2002, Gable spent a year studying the striking of matrices with a former Foucher founder of the Imprimerie Nationale.Gable is co-author of Pérennité des poinçons et matrices. Les principaux graveurs du XXe siècle, published in the book Histoire de l’écriture typographique, le XXe siècle, tome 1 : de 1900 à 1950. Publisher: Atelier Perrousseaux.On February 26, 2018, punchcutting was finally listed in the inventory of French intangible cultural heritage.

Patrick Goossens, a historian of printing technology (Universities of Antwerp and Louvain) took Fred Smeijers’s advice that “sitting and looking at punches is not enough.” He acquired the matrix-making equipment of the Dale Guild Type Foundry and completed an extensive collection of print-historical artifacts. In an effort to preserve this intangible heritage, he engaged in a punchcutting course at the Imprimerie Nationale, engaged in technical sessions at the Type Archive (London), and organized gatherings of punch- and matrix-making practitioners worldwide. Goossens is a board member of the Friends of the Plantin-Moretus Museum and of the Association of European Printing Museums. His Ph.D. researches “the introduction of innovative printing technology in 19th-century Belgium.” www.letter-kunde.be

Viktoriya Grabowska is a Ukrainian-born Polish-based independent type designer. She dedicates herself to different projects that range from type design to research. Her typefaces often cover Latin and Cyrillic. Grabowska also works with other designers and type foundries, such as Cornel Windlin Studio, Lineto, Darden Studio, NORM, Rosetta, Nova Type Foundry, Studio Aurèle Sack, and Sorkin Type. Grabowska teaches type design at the University of Arts in Poznań and School of Form.

Frank Grießhammer is a type designer and font developer. He specialized in type during his studies of graphic design at HBKsaar in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he graduated in 2008. Griesshammer also studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (KABK), where he received a Master’s degree for Design in 2010’s Type and Media course. After working for FontShop International in Berlin, he has been part of the type team at Adobe since 2011.

Hyewon Han is a planner and designer at Sandoll Communications. She studied Visual Communication Design at Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, Republic of Korea. After working in the graphic and branding design fields, Han started her career in Sandoll as a type designer. Currently, she is working not only as a designer, but also as a strategic planner and global business manager. With her keen interest in various fields, Han enjoys interacting with people from different backgrounds and loves listening to their stories.

As the Senior Director of Branding & Innovation at Adidas Global Brand Design, Leon Imas leads the look, feel, and tone of critical brand concepts and innovations. He is proud to oversee a culture of diverse creatives, working across a spectrum of disciplines and global locations. The Adidas Branding & Innovation team focuses on the creation of story and expression of future concepts, platforms, products, and technology. Each concept is created to accelerate innovation and change, driving the Adidas brand strategy toward industry and cultural disruption.

Borna Izadpanah is a typeface designer and researcher based in London. He holds an MA in Typeface Design from the University of Reading, UK, and an MA in Graphic Design from the London College of Communication. Izadpanah has received multiple awards for his original typefaces including the Grand Prize of the Granshan competition and the TDC Certificate of Typographic Excellence. Izadpanah is currently undertaking Ph.D. research on “The typographic representation of the Persian language” in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at theUniversity of Reading.

Mark Jamra is a type designer who has designed and produced typefaces for over 30 years. He is the founder of TypeCulture, a digital type foundry and academic resource, and is a founding partner of JamraPatel, a studio focusing on type design for under-supported language communities. A professor at Maine College of Art for the past 23 years, Jamra has taught graphic design, lettering, typography, and type design at colleges and workshops in the U.S. and Germany. His typefaces have received recognition from the TDC and the Association Typographique Internationale. Jamra has served on the ATypI board of directors.

Chorong Kim is a type designer at Sandoll Communications. She studied visual design at Kyunghee University in Korea and type design at ISBA Besançon and ESAD Amiens in France. Kim worked at Cadson Demak, a Thai type foundry, before joining Sandoll Communications, where she has also been involved in various projects of Korean–Latin font development. Kim is a member of Korean Society of Typography, and she is also a guest lecturer for type design in several design institutes. Kim is interested in multiscript type design and loves music.

Irin Kim is a visual designer on the Material Design team at Google, based in New York City. She has focused on developing design systems and visual identities, as well as contributing to UX/UI projects, such as Material Design guidelines (material.io), the SPAN Design and Technology conference, and surfacing variable fonts in Google Fonts (fonts.google.com). Kim recently led a project to add more Korean fonts to the Google Fonts library. To showcase these typefaces, she commissioned a website from local design studio Math Practice (googlefonts.github.io/korean).

Eric Kindel is a designer, writer, editor, and Professor of Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, where he is also head of the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication. His program of research into the history of stenciling has been underway since 1999, encompassing episodes of stencil work across a wide expanse of time and context, about which he has written and spoken extensively. Kindel has assembled a large collection of stencil artifacts to support historical investigation, teaching, publishing, and exhibitions.

Gloria Kondrup, a full-time professor at ArtCenter College of Design, has been a dedicated design educator for more than two decades. She is the director of Archetype Press, redefining the value of typography and analog technology in the digital landscape. Kondrup’s typographic fine art print works and books are in private and public collections including AIGA, the Getty, and the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. Kondrup received her Bachelor’s degree in fine art and her Master’s degree in design. She is currently the Executive Director of the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography.

Kevin Larson works for Microsoft’s Advanced Reading Technologies team. He collaborates with designers, reading psychologists, and engineers on improving the onscreen reading experience. Larson received his Ph.D. for studies of reading acquisition.

EDWINA LEE works in the Global Strategic Development department of Arphic Technology and is in charge of partnerships between font foundries and designers, marketing, and businesses overseas. Lee has enjoyed working in the font foundry for more than eight years, especially because she is surrounded by fonts every day.

Taekyeom Lee is an interdisciplinary artist, although he prefers to introduce himself as a designer using an artist’s materials and artistic sensibility. He is currently an assistant professor of graphic design at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, USA. Lee received an MFA degree in graphic design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has made three-dimensional type as a series of typographic explorations to strive, challenge, and seek a new way to create tangible type. His latest research explores unconventional methods of creating three-dimensional type with materials and techniques unique to type design, such as ceramics and 3D printing.

Huaijing Leng is Type Engineer for Hanyi Fonts. He is the manager of the Technology department of Hanyi Fonts and is also the main developer of Hanyi's in-house type editor and font management tools.

Charlotte Lengersdorf is a London-based visual communicator who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2018. Her practice focuses on the scope of written language beyond semantic content. It thematizes the body as an essential element in exploring the materiality of written language as a dynamic concept of form and performance. Lengersdorf’s practice-based experiments, as well as research-based investigations, likewise inform one another.

Gerry Leonidas teaches and researches typography and typeface design at the University of Reading, UK. He supervises MA and Ph.D. research and lectures widely. He consults on publication and typeface design, reviews bodies of work, and runs knowledge-transfer projects with a twin focus on global business development and new education initiatives. He is the president of ATypI, a founding member of the Granshan Foundation, and helps organize ICTVC and other conferences. He is the director of the MATD, and the TDi summer course; both are global reference points for type education. In 2017, Leonidas launched the MResTD, a new hybrid MA on research in typeface design.

Bruno Maag is a trained typesetter from Zurich, Switzerland. After graduating from the Basel School of Design with degrees in Typography and Visual Communications, Maag emigrated to England, where he worked for Monotype creating custom typefaces. After a year in Chicago with Monotype, he returned to England to start Dalton Maag, focusing on the creation of custom typefaces. Maag today is the Chairman of Dalton Maag and, in recent years, has spearheaded projects for large global companies and small enterprises alike. Maag’s interests today extend to scientific research into the physiology and psychology of reading.

Martin Majoor is a Dutch type designer and book typographer. Around 1990, he designed the award-winning typefaces Scala and Scala Sans. Several of his book designs have been given “best book design” awards. Majoor also designed the typefaces Telefont, Seria, and Nexus. The Questa typeface, designed with Jos Buivenga, ranked second on a list of the 50 most noteworthy font releases of 2014. Majoor has taught typography at several art schools and has given lectures and workshops around the world. He has written articles for many magazines, including Page, 2+3D, and Eye, as well as contributing to several books on typography.

Fernanda Martins is designer and researcher in typography and design history with a focus on the Amazon region. She has a doctoral degree in design history with at ESDI/UERJ, where she developed the thesis “Printing in Pará from 1820 to 1910.” Martins has a Master’s degree from the Basel School in Switzerland. She currently lives in Belem in the Amazon region, and is a partner at Mapinguari Design, a small design business curating, for example, the Floating Letter project. Martins’ field of research and interests focus on the Amazonian type expressions.

Maurice Meilleur is a recovering political theorist turned graphic designer and design educator and researcher. He is an assistant professor of graphic design in the Department of Art at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, USA, where he teaches typography, design semiotics, and research methods. Meilleur has contributed numerous type and book reviews to Typographica and Fonts in Use, and his experimental modular typeface Kast was a jury finalist in the 2016 protoType competition at TypeCon in Seattle, Washington. Presently, Meilleur is writing a book on the principles and history of modular scripts.

Jon Melton of emfoundry.com explores the empty spaces of typographic evolution within the production of new letterforms and typefaces to further our understanding of display and ornamented typography. His practice-based research is particularly concerned with Britain’s influential historical figures and their pursuits and practices that helped determine the commercial typography of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Melton is a type designer and senior lecturer in Graphic Design at the Cambridge School of Art and regularly speaks at conferences about his historical research. His type specimens have been published by industry magazines, books, and journals, and exhibited throughout Europe.

In 1993, Eric Menninga started working on the PageMaker rewrite that became Adobe InDesign. He was responsible for much of the text and typography in InDesign, including the Glyph Palette, the Paragraph Composer, OpenType font feature support, the Hyphenation Slider, and others. Menninga joined Amazon Kindle in 2011, where he developed the new KFX Kindle Format and has been working to improve digital book layout and typography.

Jeremy Mickel is primary designer and operating officer for MCKL, a Los Angeles–based design studio publishing original fonts and providing design services for clients worldwide. Founded in 2012, MCKL has collaborated with top-tier design studios, corporations, and social organizations around the world to produce custom typeface and logo services. MCKL’s work has been recognized by the Type Directors Club and the AIGA, and Mickel has taught at RISD and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

JAN MiDDENDORP studied language and literature, and in the 1980s was a founding member of three theater companies, often playing an anchorman or moderator in experimental pieces. Middendorp became a critic of literature, theatre, media, and design, as well as an editorial designer and editor. He ended up as a specialist in graphic design and type: writer and co-editor of books (Dutch Type, Shaping Text, Made with FontFont, Hand to Type, etc.) and contributor to magazines, now mostly Eye. He has been an editor and consultant to FontShop, Linotype, LucasFonts, and MyFonts. Now Middendorp is a moderator again for ATypI, after two years of mysterious absence.

Ming Wei is associate director of the Font Product Division of Beijing Founder Electronics Co., Ltd and a member of the Chinese Artists Association. Her work is part of the collection of the Sichuan Art Museum. Ming Wei designed the Beijing Olympic subway visual information system used on the Olympic Extension Line during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. This work was awarded first prize at the National Art Exhibition. She received an MA degree in Communication Design from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts in London. After returning to China, she joined FounderType and now works on font product research and project management.

JuliÁn Moncada Tobar works in Bogotá, Colombia. He studied typeface design at the University of Reading and at ANRT in Nancy, France. Since 2011, Tobar has been running a flexible practice as a freelance typeface designer. This has allowed him to work on other pleasing interests: he was an archive intern for Monotype (2012), a sessional lecturer in the UK and Colombia (2012–2016), and, for the past year, has been working as a wood-type restorer/Linotype machine apprentice/local contemporary art promoter. Tobar finds it difficult to focus.

Aoife Mooney is an Assistant Professor in the School of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University, Ohio, USA, where she teaches classes in typography, graphic design, identity, and typeface design. She is a practicing typeface designer and holds an MA in Typeface Design from the University of Reading. Mooney’s research interests are centered around the practice and theory of this field, including the broader cultural contexts and implications of typeface design and its relationship to other design fields.

Bill Moran is a third-generation letterpress printer, graphic designer, and professor of printing history at the University of Minnesota. Beginning in 2001, he volunteered at Hamilton Wood Type in a variety of roles, including the writing and publishing of his book Hamilton Wood Type: A History in Headlines. Artistic director at the Hamilton since 2009, Moran is responsible for partnerships, fundraising, and the museum’s visual brand.

Jim Moran received his apprenticeship from Moran’s Quality Print Shop in Green Bay, Wisconsin, while serving as printer’s devil, pressman, partner, and owner for 29 years. He became the Director of Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in 2009, where he maintains the collection of wood type, runs and repairs the museum’s presses, teaches workshops, archives and restores the museum’s collection of 20th-century decorative and advertising plates, and oversees museum operations. He has presented talks and run workshops at the AIGA national convention, TypeCon, Fossil World Headquarters, IBM in Austin, Texas, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Columbia Center for Book and Paper Art in Chicago, the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles, ATypI Montréal, and the APHA annual conference in Washington, DC.

Iliana Moreno Guzmán is committed to inspiring students and young professionals who are willing to solve complex problems, coaching them to become agents of change. She firmly believes knowledge must be shared and passed on, hence her delight in running workshops, being a speaker, and participating as a judge at entrepreneurship competitions. Guzmán has found in teaching a great match to expand knowledge, and to pursue her dream to be a perpetual learner. The main topics Guzmán has taught include Design Strategy, Design Thinking, Information Design, the Typographic Form, Entrepreneurship, and Leadership. Currently, she teaches full time at the UDEM: University of Monterrey.

Titus Nemeth is a type designer and typographer with expertise in Arabic script culture. His internationally recognized practice spans commercial and cultural work, and his interests and activities extend to academic research and teaching in higher education. Nemeth’s original type designs have won multiple awards and are widely used across all media. His monograph, Arabic Type-Making in the Machine Age, was published by Brill in 2017.

Eunyou Noh is a type designer and researcher from South Korea. She worked for Type-Space from 2006–2008 and taught Hangul type design at several universities (2008–2015). Noh earned her Ph.D. in visual communications at Hongik University in South Korea, her thesis being a study of Choi Jeong-ho’s Hangul type designs (2011). From 2012–2015, Noh worked as a senior researcher at the Ahn Graphics Typography Lab. She moved to the Netherlands in 2016 to participate in the Type and Media course at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK). Noh lives in The Hague and is working on the multiscript project Optique.

Riccardo Olocco is a type designer and founding partner of CAST. A Reading graduate (MA Typeface Design, 2014), Olocco is currently a Ph.D. student at Reading’s Faculty of Typography and Graphic Design. His research focuses on 15th-century Venetian roman types, combining use of bibliographical knowledge and analysis of letterforms. Olocco has freelanced as a type and graphic designer in Milan and around Northern Italy since the late 1990s, and from 2009–2013 was a lecturer in typography at the Free University of Bolzano.

on-IDLE: Ane-Mari Peter & Marc Peter Trading independently since June 1999, on-IDLE provide branding, design, and website development services for offline and online media, which include: websites, microsites, intranets, workflow applications, social media, mobile devices, touchscreen kiosks, print, logotypes, and signage. Recently, on-IDLE added responsive web design (RWD) and UK print buying to its expert services offering. They specialize in developing online e-Commerce and workflow-based solutions, mostly driven by their in-house open source Content Management System (CMS) developed on the open source CakePHP Framework or WordPress, depending on the business and communication requirements of a CMS. Automation is successfully applied through multiple third-party systems’ integrations through APIs such as e-Commerce Payment Gateways, Magento Shopping Cart, SalesForce, Sugar CRM, LiveChat, GitLab, MailChimp, AWebber, Google Maps, and Google Graphs. An independent, London- based agency, the company was set up in 1999 with the desire to mix leading technology with quality design. on-IDLE deliver solutions across a variety of platforms, cultures, languages, and market sectors. Typical customers are in the media, retail, sustainability, education, telecoms, and not-for-profit sectors from as far as China, UK, Germany, North America, and Switzerland, with a repeat business rate of at least 65%.

Michel Paré studied graphic design and technique at the Art Academie Artibus, Utrecht, the Netherlands, and has worked as a graphic designer and web designer. He attended the Expert Class Type Design at the Plantin Institute of Typography in Antwerp, Belgium. Paré conducted research in the history of typographic ornaments, especially those of J.F. Rosart. Paré recently digitized a large number of Rosart’s typographical ornaments and some of the 18th-century Belgian punchcutter’s flourished capitals. The digitized ornaments and an accompanying publication will be published by the Dutch Type Library.

Eloïse Parrack is Senior Teaching Fellow and graphic design pathway coordinator on BA (Hons) Graphic Arts at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. She is a UK–based graphic designer in type, print, and web design with an MA in Sequential Design and Illustration from University of Brighton. Parrack’s typeface Raeling is distributed through Volcano Type, and she is currently a student at the Expert Class in Type Design at the Plantin Institute for Typography in Antwerp, Belgium.

Neil Patel is a type designer and former semiconductor process engineer based in Portland, Maine. He is the founder of Tetradtype, an independent type foundry, and partner of JamraPatel, a studio focusing on multiscript type systems. Patel’s collaborative logotype designs with local studios have been featured in HOW magazine and Communication Arts. Patel also has been known to dabble in programming, which he occasionally ties back into his design practice.

Daria Petrova studied book design in Moscow and communication design in Berlin. In 2016, she graduated from the Type and Media Master’s program in The Hague, where she creatively channeled her long-standing interest in grave markers. Petrova is now back in Berlin, working at LucasFonts, discovering new graveyards, and designing her own typefaces.

Thomas Phinney is CEO of FontLab, the font software tools company. Previously, he had font-related management roles at Adobe and Extensis. In the 2000s, Phinney helped drive the adoption of OpenType, both within Adobe and in the marketplace. He developed character-set standards for Adobe, and designed the Latin/Greek/Cyrillic typefaces Hypatia Sans and Cristoforo. Phinney has four patents and an MS in printing and typography from RIT—where he did his thesis on technical challenges in Multiple Master font technology—and an MBA from UC Berkeley. Phinney has been on the board of ATypI since 2004.

Morgane Pierson holds a Diplôme supérieur d’Arts Appliqués in Graphic Design from Lille, 2016. She has also been engaged in the personal study of Nsibidi, pictograms and ideograms of Nigeria. Since 2017, Pierson has been a Research Student at Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT), Nancy, in the Missing Scripts Program.

Qiu Yin is the Expert Commissioner of Chinese Type Design and Research Center and the design director at FounderType, a member of the Chinese Designer Salon (CDS) and the Shenzhen Graphic Design Association (SGDA). Yin is also the designer of 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games logotype and the recipient of several awards, including the Grand Prize at Chinese Pen Calligraphy Competition (1985), first prize at the First International Pen Calligraphy Contest (1988), and the China Design Red Star Award (2015).

Rathna Ramanathan is a graphic designer whose research and practice is situated around and inspired by the contexts of culture, language, typography, and publishing. Originally from Chennai and now based in London, Ramanathan specializes in the research, design, and curation of marginalized content and endangered practices within intercultural publishing, with South Asia as a site of investigation. She runs her own studio, minus9, and has a Ph.D. in Typography and Graphic Communication from the University of Reading. Ramanathan has taught in India and in the UK. She heads Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art.

After obtaining her Degree in Advertising, María Ramos worked as a graphic and editorial designer in Santiago de Compostela, an emblematic town in the northwest of Spain. In 2015, she graduated with distinction from the MA in Typeface Design program from the University of Reading. Since then, Silva has been an active member of the typographic community, both as a designer and as a researcher. She is a contributor to sites like Alphabettes.org and Typographica. In 2016, together with Noel Pretorius, Silva founded the independent type foundry NM type.

Dan Reynolds is a type designer and design history researcher in Berlin. He began working at LucasFonts in May 2018. In March 2018, Reynolds submitted his doctoral dissertation on the relationship of late-19th- and early-20th-century German-speaking foundries with freelance type designers; this is currently being assessed by the Braunschweig University of Art. Before beginning his academic research and teaching, Reynolds spent several years at the old Linotype GmbH (2004—2011).

David Jonathan Ross draws letters of all shapes and sizes for custom and retail typeface designs. A native of Los Angeles, Ross began drawing typefaces at Hampshire College and joined the Font Bureau in 2007, where he honed his bezier-wrangling skills. Now Ross publishes typefaces of visual and technical interest at his own foundry, DJR, as well as working on projects with Type Network and developing display faces for his Font of the Month Club. You’ll find him in Western Massachusetts with his partner Emily and their two dogs, Sophie and Lily.

Fiona Ross specializes in non-Latin type design and typography, having a background in languages with a Ph.D. in Indian Palaeography (SOAS). Ross works as a consultant, type designer, author, and lecturer. Her recent design work has been in collaboration with Tim Holloway, John Hudson, and Neelakash Kshetrimayum for clients such as Ananda Bazar Patrika, Adobe, Microsoft, Monotype, and Harvard University Press. Ross is a part-time staff member of the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading (UK), where she is Professor of Non-Latin Type Design.

Petra Rüth, coming from a background in classical graphic design, is now focusing on type. She is concentrating on blackletter, specifically on the relationship between the Fraktur, Kanzlei, and Kurrent scripts. While Rüth enjoys reading historic books, she also practices formal penmanship (with quills). Currently studying at the HGB Leipzig, Germany, Rüth is researching the work of C.G. Roßberg, who published a writing manual about the mathematical construction of letters in the late 18th century.

Keitaro Sakamoto is the Operation Manager of the 2019 Morisawa Type Design Competition. He joined Morisawa Inc. in 2008, where he worked in promoting font products and took charge of start-up projects such as “UD Typeface” and “TypeSquare (webfont).” Sakamoto invited new designs from domestic and overseas designers for the Type Design Competition, which was resumed in 2012 after a decade-long hiatus. He studied abroad at the Rhode Island School of Design, majoring in Graphic Design and Digital+Media, and was the Research Fellow in 2010. With the experience he acquired from RISD, Sakamoto took charge as the project manager of the corporate sites. He has participated in design events such as Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) as the speaker to improve international recognition of Morisawa. He was appointed as the guest judge at the Good Design Award 2013.

Alice Savoie is an independent typeface designer, teacher, and researcher. She holds an MA and a Ph.D. from the University of Reading (UK). Savoie collaborates with design studios and type foundries on the design of multiscript typeface families. In 2018, she released the typeface family Faune, commissioned by the Centre national des arts plastiques in partnership with the Groupe Imprimerie Nationale. Savoie teaches and supervises research projects at ANRT Nancy, Ésad Amiens, and ENSBA Lyon (FR). She is the principal postdoctoral researcher on the Leverhulme-funded project “Women in Type” under the supervision of Fiona Ross at the University of Reading.

José Scaglione is a graphic designer, typeface designer, and co-founder with Veronika Burian of the independent type foundry TypeTogether, where they have published numerous award-winning type families. He teaches typography at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is frequently invited to lecture about typography and to lead workshops on typeface design at international conferences and academic institutions. Scaglione coauthored the book Cómo Crear Tipografías: Del Boceto a la Pantalla (How to Create Typefaces: From Sketch to Screen), and collaborated with Jorge de Buen Unna on his book Introducción al Estudio de la Tipografía. In 2012, Scaglione acted as chairman of the Letter.2 type design competition and conference. He served as president of ATypI from 2013–2017.

Rainer Erich “Eric” Scheichelbauer was born in Vienna. A trained photographer, Scheichelbauer holds degrees in philosophy and Dutch studies. He creates typefaces, works as a digital punchcutter for other type designers, and gives type design workshops on a regular basis. Since Scheichelbauer joined the Glyphs team in 2012, he has been writing articles, tutorials, and Python scripts, as well as working on a blog and handbook. Scheichelbauer lives and works in Vienna, where he runs his type studio, Schriftlabor.

Radek Sidun devotes himself primarily to fonts and typography. His graduation thesis at the UMPRUM Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design dealt with the issue of diacritics in world languages. As a result, he is a sought-after consultant to font designers and type foundries the world over. He currently serves as a pedagogue at the Type Design and Typography studio of the UMPRUM Academy in Prague. Together with Tomáš Brousil, he founded Briefcase Type Foundry in 2012. Sidun is also a member of the editorial and design team of the TYPO9010 book project.

Fred Smeijers is a Dutch type designer, teacher, researcher, and writer. Educated at the school of art in Arnhem, he worked as a typographic advisor to the reprographic company Océ, then became a founding member of the graphic design practice Quadraat, which provided the name for his first published typeface (FontFont, 1992). His distinctive typeface designs include Renard (TEFF), Nobel (DTL), and Arnhem, Fresco, Sansa, Custodia, Ludwig, and Puncho, which were all first published by OurType, the font label he cofounded and led as creative director until 2017. He has created custom type designs and lettering for Philips Electronics, Canon-Europe, Tom-Tom, Samsung, and Porsche. Smeijers’s first book, Counterpunch, was published by Hyphen Press in 1996, followed by a second edition in 2011 and translations into French, Japanese, and Portuguese. In 2001, Smeijers was awarded the Gerrit Noordzij Prize for outstanding contributions to type design. In 2016, the Society of Typographic Aficionados awarded Smeijers the SOTA Typography Award. Smeijers is a research fellow at the Plantin Museum in Antwerp, professor of type design at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, and visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague.

Geertrui Storms is a designer and lettering artist. During her graphic design studies, she fell in love with drawing letters. After getting her Master’s degree, Storms took a course in web design before starting work as a cross-media designer. Her real passion, however, has always been in print and letters—a passion that has not only surfaced in workshops all over Belgium, but also in her continuous drive to keep learning, like during Typography Summer School in London or Typo Berlin. In 2016, Storms started working as a freelancer to be able to create and do the things she loves most.

Anton Studer has a Master’s degree in Type Design from the Zurich University of the Arts. From 2012–2015, he was a teaching assistant at the ZHdK and has been a staff member since 2015. Studer’s typeface designs have been awarded international prizes by organizations such as the Type Directors Club. In addition to his dedication to designing and drawing letters, he is a passionate cyclist and gardener.

Clovis Vallois studied visual communication in Freiburg, Germany, and completed a CAS in Type Design at the Zurich University of the Arts. In 2011, he cofounded Nouvelle Noire; from 2012–2013, he was a designer with Ateliers Jean Nouvel/HW Architecture in Paris. In cooperation with Philippe Apeloig, Vallois worked on the design development of the signage system for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Vallois is also engaged in design, research, and teaching.

Sergio Trujillo is a Mexican multidisciplinary designer. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Information Design from the Universidad de las Américas Puebla, a Master’s degree in Graphic Branding and Identity from the London College of Communication, and a Master’s degree in Typeface Design from the University of Reading. Trujillo currently works as an independent typeface designer and as a full-time typography professor at the Universidad de Monterrey.

Adam Twardoch is Director of Products of FontLab. He has also worked as a font consultant for MyFonts, Monotype, Google, Adobe, and many independent font vendors, specializing in font technology, multilingual typography, webfonts, Unicode, and OpenType. Twardoch has been a core member of the initiatives that created the OpenType Font Variations and OpenType SVG color font specifications. He co-designed several type families, including Lato (by Łukasz Dziedzic) and Milka (by Botio Nikoltchev). Twardoch served on the ATypI board for many years and regularly teaches workshops on font creation. He lives and works in Warsaw and Berlin.

UNDERWARE’s cheeky name is just the beginning; making stuff everyone desires is their real calling. Underware is a characterful font foundry that creates ambitious type-based solutions. Haptic and intrepid in everything from retail fonts and exclusive branding to custom type and coding their own design tools, the partnership of Akiem Helmling, Sami Kortemäki, and Bas Jacobs somehow seems to grab hold of the future. Underware embraces challenge with the belief that purpose should define the approach. Their last few years have been spent in expanding the notion of type and the collegial aspects of typography. They experiment, code, and diligently produce new tools on the furthest edge of type design technology, but ensure they are blatantly simple to understand and use. You’re invited along.

Fascinated by design in all its aspects, Walda Verbaenen graduated in 1990 from the Saint Luke Institute in Brussels, Graphic Design department. She combines her work as a graphic designer with her experience as a teacher. Verbaenen is an alumna of the Expert Class Type Design at the Plantin Institute in Antwerp, where, under the guidance of Frank E. Blokland, she became addicted to researching historical material as a starting point for designing new fonts. Verbaenen is always looking for the ultimate details in fonts and is intrigued by the balance between different shapes and forms.

Shensheng Wen is Vice-President & CTO of Hanyi Fonts. He has been a determined explorer of type design for more than 30 years. Wen is an expert in Chinese type design and production with the parametric method, and is the creator of more than 30 Chinese typefaces.

Roman Wilhelm studied under Fred Smeijers for a typeface design Master’s degree at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, Germany. He was a member of the Multilingual Typography Research Group at the Zurich University of the Arts. A fluent Chinese speaker, Wilhelm focuses his work on cross-cultural interaction, multilingual typography, and science communications, both in theory and in practice. Roman's first Chinese typeface, Laowai Sung (Arphic), was nominated for the 2014 Tokyo TDC award. In 2015, Wilhelm was an artist in residence at the Hong Kong Baptist University. At present, he is nominated for the Stadtdrucker award of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz.

Nathan Willis is a type consultant and researcher based in West Texas. He is a 2017 graduate of the MATD program at the University of Reading.

Jeff Wu is the General Manager of Arphic Technology, leading Arphic’s R&D division for more than 20 years. His specialties are development of font technology and products; he is also familiar with font design and application on various devices. Before Arphic, Wu worked as a Software Engineer and Manager of the Software department at Mitac International Corp. He received his BS and MS degrees in computer science from National Chiao-Tung University of Taiwan.

Xuan Zhang is Type Designer for Hanyi Fonts. He is a graduate in graphic design from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Zhang joined Hanyi Fonts in 2014, and so far has taken charge of non-Chinese design and has customized type projects for Hanyi.

Susanne Zippel grew up under the Communist dictatorship of the former German Democratic Republic. While still studying design in Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she moved to Japan, and later founded the design office Mittelpunkt•Zhongdian in China. For more than two decades she has been researching the history of writing and media in China, Japan, and Korea, with a special focus on sociology and linguistics. She published the first extensive foundational book on Chinese typography, Fachchinesisch Typografie, which provides a comprehensive insight into the so-called CJK writing system and its cultural context. She is currently studying for her doctorate in Vienna, Austria.